59. The Orphan Does Not Rejoice After a Heavy Breakfast

Traditional music education is an over inflated attempt to force the perception to work in a situation of natural disaster. Not one of the elements of this work has any guide to its unison with the others, and gathered together, they become a new challenge with many unknowns.

Sight reading doesn’t depend on the normal and natural voicing stage: singing the abstract note symbols’ names out loud. The beginner is expected to jump all the way over to the Stage of Rules. Only extremely gifted people can do this.

In countries that use the Alphabetic System, the multi-directionality of notes could easily be taught if the music alphabet were used in lessons. Instead, the beginners are offered a few short phrases that support the notes’ movement in only one direction – Every Good Boy Does Fine!

In traditional lessons, the grand staff is deprived of any graphic guides to help decipher it for reading. Understanding depends on the use of elementary cramming.

The organization of the keys produces several problems at once, and the lessons don’t provide any guides to their solutions.

The only guide to memorization of the white keys is a precise understanding of the black. But this hasn’t been formed yet!

Note sequences don’t depend on the music alphabet and different cycles of it. The perception is left to mechanically memorize the seven notes and their octaves in order to understand the keys. If the Alphabet System is used, then the guide here is knowledge of the English alphabet. This makes it much harder to read notes in the opposite order.

The study of the piano keys is separated from the graphics of the grand staff, as if these systems aren’t connected at all. As a result, learning the keys doesn’t help to read the notes, and memorization of the notes doesn’t help to learn the keys.

Exercises for the development of coordination barely help to read music notation. They are based on simple sequences and don’t require an ability to read music.

Because of these methodological blunders, reading notes is simply impossible for most beginners. Until literacy becomes universally accessible and spreads through a wide network of education, it is left out of the way like Cinderella, waiting for its magic hour away from its evil stepmother.